You can bandy about all the earnest statistics and well-meaning initiatives and heavily funded social engineering experiments you want.

You can wring your hands and tug your forelock and lie awake at night desperately seeking solutions for the crushing poverty and rampant criminality, for the open-air drug market and the mentally ill street wanderers.

You can build more low-income housing and actively campaign for grassroots help, from the experts and the non-profits, from the government and the rich, and even from the middle class that pays the bills to make the city livable for everyone.

But it still boils down to this: If you want to turn the Downtown Eastside — relentlessly branded as Canada’s poorest postal code, a notorious cesspool of enabled addicts, revolving-door criminals, sanctioned poverty and supervised narcotic consumption — into a place where families want to live, where it is safe to walk the streets and where felons and drug addicts are treated, well, like felons and drug addicts, then you need to face facts.

Because if you want to invest yet another truckload of taxpayer dollars to revitalize and stabilize this tiny patch of downtown dysfunction, you need to talk less about density and development and mealy-mouthed obligation and more about reality, and accountability.

And you need to ask yourself, as a society: Is Vancouver city council’s latest plan to put the polish on an over-protected money pit going to make one whit of difference to a part of town where social victory is celebrated with the installation of a vending machine that sells 25-cent crack pipes?

If you were a right-thinking person, the kind who eschews Liberal guilt and instead leans toward the crisp clarity of the real world, you would look to human behaviour and civic history before you decide to launch a $1-billion, 30-year concept called the Downtown Eastside Local Area Plan.

That plan, announced by the city last week, is floating a dreamy look at developer-unfriendly DTES housing, including 4,400 units of new or replacement housing over the next 30 years, with micro units of 250 square feet and a firm hand on the runaway high-profile density that has so altered the downtown skyline.

It is, not to put too fine a laser on it, an effort to put even more low-income housing in an area already over-saturated with folks who might best be served residing in more healthy environs. That is, anywhere but the DTES.

But that’s where the pipe dream comes in, because it’s clear we decided long ago to ensure that those few blocks of downtown real estate would be reserved for social chaos.

For those too young to recall, or too new to town to have yet absorbed its history, it wasn’t always so. The corner of Main and Hastings was once a vital social destination where busloads of schoolchildren from the growing suburbs would pull up outside the Carnegie Museum (now a community centre guarded by patrolling drug dealers) and spend the day exploring the wonders of mummies and archeological artifacts.

A spot where you could park at dinner time, right on Hastings and Columbia, and pop in for a fresh serving of Alaska black cod at The Only Seafood Cafe, returning to a car with all its windows intact. Where moms and daughters could spend the day strolling the shops on the retail strip from Army & Navy to Eaton’s, stopping for lunch at the Woodward’s food counter, no purse-clutching required.

Where the lovely Pantages Theatre was a vaudeville hot spot, where a woman in a pretty dress and a man in a nice suit might go on a date, before the historic hall was allowed to decay and fall to a wrecking ball.

The kind of place you could wander about night or day without fear of being stabbed, robbed or accosted, but for the stumbling about of an occasional harmless drunk spilling out of a residential hotel, originally home to the disenfranchised and unemployable men who migrated to the big city from the logging and forestry camps.

Today, there is much warranted sympathy for those living in the DTES who suffer from our collective failure, especially at the government level, to compassionately treat the truly mentally ill.

But one does grow weary of the attention paid, and money spent, on the thousands of others in the DTES who have wilfully chosen crime and addiction as their life’s calling.

Surely there is nowhere else on the planet where there are, per capita, more social agencies, free handouts, homeless shelters, subsidized housing, soup kitchens and blind-eyed acts of illegality than in the DTES, where uncounted millions have been spent over many decades on a few thousand people living in a few square blocks, all of it vainly trying to fix a problem that has become so entrenched it defies a solution.

So where, one wonders in the face of the city’s latest overture of taxpayer largesse and social optimism, is the budget for the cleanup crew?

Because until we apply the moral and legal standards to the DTES that we do to every other community in Metro Vancouver, it will never change. And we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.

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